This blog hit a milestone/ Half a million views!

 The majority of people reading my posts are the result of being on my email list. I used to send them via Constant Contact. Now I am happily on Substack.

I haven’t ever tried to calculate the actual number of emails opened and read. The one constant is that after I send the email, the posts get placed in my blog. This I can track and my little blog hit 500,000!

It motivated me to take a little trip down memory lane.

I can pinpoint when it started. Back in 2009 when I was working at Noe Valley Pediatrics there was an H1N1 flu epidemic. It feels like a lifetime ago. A vaccine was created fairly quickly, but there was a short supply. While many people are willing to wait in line for their own health care, trust me, that gets thrown on the window when it comes to their children.

The office phones were ringing off the hook and people tried to navigate getting their kids the shot as quickly as possible. There was no way to keep up with the demand for information. Continuous busy signals added to everyone’s stress.

The mother of one of our young patients suggested that I start a blog as a way to communicate any updates. I knew nothing about blogging, but it sounded reasonable. My blogging career was born.

Through the blog I was able to let people know quickly when we got the flu vaccine shipments and how we were managing the allocation.

Several months later, things had settled down from that scary flu season, but I now had a platform and I had thoughts on how to use it. I had come to recognize that many of my patients had the same questions (over and over and over). To minimize the need for frequent repetition, I started writing posts that addressed some of the more common issues.

The blog became an easy resource. At work if one of my callers had a question about a fever, a rash, strep throat etc, I would email a link to the related post and have them call me if they had any follow up questions. It was a great system.

I changed the name to Nurse Judy’s Approach. I got in the habit of sending out a weekly post on Friday mornings. I would often pick new topics based on what was going around. My patients also put in requests for things they wanted me to cover.

I confess to mixed feelings when I had my first moment of internet fame for my head lice post.

I loved writing and it felt so nice getting feedback about how my posts helped people get the information that they needed without freaking them out.

I also loved how much I learned along the way.

It’s time for some gratitude.

Thanks to my loyal readers who have stuck with me from the beginning, even as my subject matter has expanded and your children have grown. Welcome to all the newer readers who somehow found me.

Thanks to all of you who have shared the posts with others!

Thanks to the many doctors, specialists and experts in their fields who generously shared their wisdom with me when I would do a deep dive into a topic.

Thanks to Dr. Ted for encouraging me to keep the habit going. Collaborating with him while we update the old posts and create new ones is so much fun. No one can go down rabbit holes quite like the pair of us.

Yes we are hard at work for the enormous sleep post that I promised….It is coming.

Thanks especially to my husband Sandy who decided that my grammar was horrible enough that it shouldn’t be allowed out in public; he started editing for me several years ago. (While my attitude was always that if someone really got annoyed by an errant comma, they could get their information someplace else; BTW, he found six errors in the draft of this post!)

Thanks Rebecca for getting me over the hump

And later that day…..

Thanks for reading!!!